Study: unlock creative thought by zapping left prefrontal cortex

If you've always fancied yourself an artist, but sadly the
talent fails to flow, a team of neuroscientists may have found the
key to unlocking your inner Van Gogh: zap your prefrontal cortex
with a mild electrical charge to induce "sensory filtering".

The prefrontal cortex is the region of the brain that filters
our actions -- cognitive processes and decision-making takes place
here, allowing us to read and react to social cues in everyday
interactions. The left prefrontal cortex in particular has been associated with
the semantic working memory, linked to our understanding of
language. It is essential for most tasks, but it's argued it can
also act as a barrier to creative thought.

"When we use objects in daily life, our cognitive control helps
us focus on what the object is typically used for and 'filters out'
irrelevant properties," explainedd Evangelia Chrysikou, one
of the authorrs on a paper revealing the find method. "However, to come up with
the idea of using a baseball bat as a rolling pin, you have to
consider things like its shape and the material it's made of."

Chrysikou, along with a team of neuroscientists, biomedical
engineers and psychologists from the University of Pennsylvania and
the City College of New York, decided to test this hypothesis, and
trial a method for improving or instigating an individual's ability
to extend the parameters of their imagination. They opted for a
non-invasive method of suppressing the prefrontal cortex called
transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) -- whereby
electrodes deliver low, continuous currents -- the idea being it
could be a relatively replicable/easily transportable method for
sparking creativity.

The charge can stimulate or limit the activity between
connections in the brain, and the team used it to force the former
to occur in different brain regions. One group of volunteers
received the electrical charge to the left prefrontal cortex, one
to the right and a third acted as the control group, administered a
quick burst before the experiment began (to stimulate the
sensation) before the device was switched off.

Each of these three groups was then split into two -- both would
be shown a total of 60 realistic pictures of everyday objects, one
every nine seconds. The difference was one half would be asked to
state the object's normal use, the other would have to come up with
an unusual use for it, thereby drumming up some imaginative
activity. The consensus was that full use of the region controlling
cognition -- particular the left -- would make it harder to come up
with novel uses. And this is exactly what they found.

Those in the control group and those that had their right
prefrontal cortex activity limited struggled to come up with
unusual uses, failing 15 out of 60 times on average (they had to
come up with it before the nine seconds was up). The left
prefrontal cortex group failed an average of eight times and
candidates answered a second faster. The results suggest the left
prefrontal cortex filters out "irrelevant properties" so we can get
on with our day and use the things around us more efficiently --
it's not interesting in the details, just the general picture. One
second might not sound like a staggering difference, but according
to Sharon Thompson-Schill, Penn professor of psychology and
director of the university's Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, it
is epic.

"A second faster difference is huge in psychology research," she
said in a statement. "We're used to seeing differences measured in
milliseconds. This is probably the biggest effect I've seen over my
20 years in research."

Repeated in every candidate it's enough to draw a conclusion
that the left prefrontal cortex, so busy recording and processing
the world, can suppress imaginative thought. That doesn't mean we
should switch it off to become true dreamers and artists -- it's
also what gets people through exam revision and thorough research.
But, according to Thompson-Schill, it may explain why children have
such over-active imaginations but a low attention span: "we differ
from non-human primates in having a long period of immaturity in
our prefrontal cortex." In other words, it takes a while for the
region to fully develop, and in the interim we build up the vision
of the world around us with slightly different tools from those
which dictate adulthood. Children are encouraged ot practice using
it to develop it fully early on.

A portable left prefrontal cortex-zapping headset for smashing
through writer's block would be much appreciated, though.